Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke called it “a failure to communicate.” Is this the reason we often fail to just get along as Rodney King admonished us? Some examples:

Deborah Tannen, in her book, You Just Don’t Understand, tells this story:

“A married couple was in a car when the wife turned to her husband and asked, "Would you like to stop for a coffee?"

"No, thanks," he answered truthfully. So they didn't stop.

The result? The wife, who had indeed wanted to stop, became annoyed because she felt her preference had not been considered. The husband, seeing his wife was angry, became frustrated. Why didn't she just say what she wanted?”

A much more tragic version of a lack of understanding was told in the March 7th, New York Times (“After A Loss, A Father Sees A Lesson for Palestinians In A Translation Of An Israel’s Work”) about the father of a boy killed in a Palestinian terrorist attack.

The irony is that the dead boy was a Palestinian out for a jog who was mistaken for a Jew by his attackers. Adding insult to irony, his father is a Palestinian and a “Jerusalem lawyer who often fights Israeli confiscation of land from Palestinians.”

A Palestinian philosopher, Sari Nusseibeh, is quoted in the story commenting on the parallel existences of Jews and Palestinian Arabs: “Weren’t both sides of the conflict totally immersed in their own tragedies, each one oblivious to or even antagonistic toward the narrative of the other? Isn’t this inability to imagine the lives of the “other” at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?”

I got a taste of the “inability to imagine the lives of the other” when, on March 6th, I attended a debate on the Arizona State Campus between Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s top political advisor and Howard Dean, the former head of the Democratic National Committee. With each statement by either Rove or Dean, half the audience applauded and half shouted insults.

In a different context, the New York Times Magazine on March 7th carried a story called, “Building A Better Teacher” about efforts to improve teacher training. In the story, an education researcher was quoted as saying, “At the heart of teaching is an ability to step outside of our own head. Teaching depends on what other people think, not what you think.”

An Indian prayer says, “Grant that I may not criticize my neighbor until I have walked a mile in his moccasins.” Good advice when it was first uttered, good advice now.

QUESTIONS? COMMENTS? LJBARKAN@THEPIVOTALFACTOR.COM

Permission to reproduce is granted as long as the following citation is included:

Reprinted by permission of the author, Larry Barkan: http://www.conflictresolutiontraining.net